2013 November

Today the JURI (legal affairs) committee of the European Parliament approved the compromise text of the proposed directive on collective rights management in the EU (478 KB PDF, passages in bold are changes from the original proposal). The main objective of the directive is to facilitate the licensing of music throughout Europe (which is currently being done on a country-by-country basis) and to increase the transparency and accountability of collective rights management organisations operating in Europe.

Creative Commons has been following the discussions about the directive. Many collecting societies for authors of musical works prevent their members from electing alternative licensing frameworks, such as Creative Commons licenses, for their work. The directive provided an opportunity to change this situation by establishing clear rules for all European countries.

Over the past few years Creative Commons and its European affiliates have teamed up with Collecting Societies to allow, on a controlled basis, pilot projects that allow members of the participating societies to use the NonCommercial CC licenses. Such pilot projects have been launched in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and France, and they have demonstrated that collective rights management and the use of Creative Commons licenses can go hand in hand.

During the discussion of the directive, Creative Commons advocated (together with others) that the directive should include provisions that would ensure that members of collecting societies can individually license their rights. As a result, the European Parliament introduced language in the directive that requires collecting societies to allow their members ‘to grant licences for the non-commercial uses of the rights, categories of rights or types of works and other subject matter of their choice.‘

We are happy to report that this new provision (article 5.2.a) has made it into the final text that was voted on in the European Parliament today. This means that once the directive has been adopted (there is one more vote in Parliament which is basically a formality), members of all European Collecting Societies will have the rights to grant licenses for non-commercial use of their work, opening the door for the use of the three Creative Commons licenses that allow non-commercial use of the licensed work.

Creative Commons applauds the European lawmakers with this step. The new directive will strengthen the rights of members of collecting societies, and we are looking forward to a future where musicians all over Europe enjoy more flexibility in sharing their creations.

Mountain View, CA, November 26, 2013: Creative Commons (CC) announced today that Version 4.0 of its licensing suite is now available for use worldwide.

This announcement comes at the end of a two-year development and consultation process, but in many ways, it began much earlier. Since 2007, CC has been working with legal experts around the world to adapt the 3.0 licenses to local laws in over 35 jurisdictions. In the process, CC and its affiliates learned a lot about how the licenses function internationally. As a result, the 4.0 licenses are designed to function in every jurisdiction around the world, with no need for localized adaptations.

In a blog post celebrating the launch, CC general counsel Diane Peters acknowledged the role that CC’s affiliates played in developing the new licenses. “The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.”

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creators and copyright holders can use its licenses to allow the general public to use and republish their content without asking for permission in advance. There are over half a billion Creative Commons–licensed works, spanning the worlds of arts and culture, science, education, business, government data, and more.

The improvements in Version 4.0 reflect the needs of a diverse and growing user base. The new licenses include provisions related to database rights, personality rights, data mining, and other issues that have become more pertinent as CC’s user base has grown. “These improvements may go unnoticed by many CC users, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important,” Peters said. “We worry about the slight nuances of the law so our users don’t have to.”

We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.

We had ambitious goals in mind when we embarked on the versioning process coming out of the 2011 CC Global Summit in Warsaw. The new licenses achieve all of these goals, and more. The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.

Among other exciting new features are improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that allows those who violate the license inadvertently to regain their rights automatically if the violation is corrected in a timely manner.

The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.

There are over half a billion pieces of Creative Commons–licensed content in the world. That’s an impressive number, but it only hints at how powerful and widespread CC licenses have become. The real impact is in the stories of how people like you use CC licenses. When you use a CC-licensed photo in a presentation or share your latest song under CC, you’re a part of the story of CC’s impact in the world. We’re proud to share in this amazing journey with you.

Today, we’re excited to launch Team Open, a new initiative of our staff and community. We’ve been spending the past few months talking to the CC community, looking for its favorite stories of how CC licenses benefit real people. You’ll meet a young scientist fighting cancer with free research, an entrepreneur who’s putting the public back in public domain, and a quirky musician who’s built his career on giving music away. We hope these stories inspire you, and we hope you feel inspired to share them with your friends and colleagues.

We’re also launching our annual fundraising campaign today. We have some cool giveaways this year, including a Team Open t-shirt and set of trading cards. To make it fun, we’re setting a little goal for ourselves. We’d like to see 600 donors by January. We’ll be keeping you up-to-date on our progress via Twitter and Facebook. If Creative Commons is important to you but you’ve never made a donation, this could be the day!

CC is more than a license to share; it’s a license for all of us to create a better world.

Creative Commons has responded to the European Commission’s consultation on recommended standard licenses, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information (PSI). See our response here. The Commission asked for comments on these issues in light of the adoption of the new Directive on re-use of public sector information. The Directive 1) brings libraries, museums, and archives under the scope of the Directive, 2) provides a positive re-use right to public documents, 3) limits acceptable charging to only marginal costs of reproduction, provision, and dissemination, and 4) reiterates the position that documents can be made available for re-use under open standards and using machine readable formats. CC recognizes the high value of PSI not only for innovation and transparency, but also for scientific, educational and cultural benefit for the entire society.

The Commission has not yet clarified what should be considered a “standard license” for re-use (Article 8). The dangers of license proliferation–which potentially leads to incompatible PSI–is still present. But it’s positive that the Commission is using this consultation to ask specific questions regarding legal aspects of re-use.

Part 3 of the questionnaire deals with licensing issues. One question asks what should be the default option for communicating re-use rights. We believe that there should be no conditions attached to the re-use of public sector information. The best case scenario would be for public sector information to be in the public domain, exempt from copyright protection altogether by amending national copyright laws. If it’s not possible to pass laws granting positive re-use rights to PSI without copyright attached, public sector bodies should use the CC0 Public Domain Dedication (CC0) to place public data into the worldwide public domain to ensure unrestricted re-use.

Another question first states that the Commission prefers the least restrictive re-use regime possible, and asks respondents to choose which condition(s) would be aligned with this goal. Again, we think that every condition would be deemed restrictive, since ideally PSI would be removed from the purview of copyright protection through law or complete dedication of the PSI to the public domain using CC0. If the Commission were to permit public sector bodies to incorporate limited conditions through licensing, then they should be expected to use standard public licenses aligned with the Open Definition (with a preference for “attribution only” licenses). A simple obligation to acknowledge the source of the data could be accomplished by adopting a liberal open license, like CC BY. Such a license would also cover other issues, such as acknowledging that an adaptation has been made or incorporating a waiver of liability. Some of the conditions listed would be detrimental to interoperability of PSI. An obligation not to distort the original meaning or message of public sector data should be deemed unacceptable. Such an obligation destroys compatibility with standard public licenses that uniformly do not contain such a condition. The UK’s Open Government License has already removed this problematic provision when it upgraded from OGL 1.0 to OGL 2.0.

In addition to mentioning CC licensing as a common solution, the questionnaire notes, “several Member States have developed national licenses for re-use of public sector data. In parallel, public sector bodies at all levels sometimes resort to homegrown licensing conditions.” In order to achieve the goals of the Directive and “to promote interoperable conditions for crossborder re-use,” the Commission should consider options that minimize incompatibilities between pools of PSI, which in turn maximize re-use. As far as we are concerned that means that governments should be actively discouraged from developing their own licenses. Instead, they should be encouraged to adopt standard public licenses aligned with the Open Definition. But even better would be to consider removing copyright protection for PSI by amending copyright law or waiving copyright and related rights using CC0.

It was inspiring to be among the several hundred who gathered in Argentina, meeting with the global affiliate network, CC staff, and our allies in the open movement. We had several days of substantive interactions with representatives from over 80 countries, enriched by our diverse cultures, language, and experiences.

CC’s board of directors held its summer meeting during the summit. Our agenda focused on our strategic priorities, license version 4.0, copyright reform, and upcoming shifts within the board and organization.

Board member Michael Carroll provided an overview of the 4.0 license suite, now poised for launch this month.

We held a preliminary discussion of the copyright reform policy statement developed by the CC community to support copyright reform efforts around the world, and approved it at the next Board meeting, in October.

We discussed candidates nominated by the community to join the CC Board of Directors and newly formed Advisory Council. Stellar recommendations emerged from the open call process, and I look forward to announcing the names of our new governance leadership after our December board meeting.

Copyright Reform

From the earliest days of Creative Commons, there has been ongoing discussion about the degree to which it is appropriate for the organization to engage in the copyright reform debate. While the organization’s mission has always been to help creators share their knowledge and creativity with the world, our licenses are necessarily embedded in and adjunct to copyright law. Moreover, many of CC’s affiliates are leaders of the copyright reform movements in their respective countries.

Those discussions culminated at the summit, when affiliates held a special pre-summit conference to discuss Creative Commons’ role in the copyright reform debate. The event was the one of the best-attended sessions of the entire summit, with over 100 individuals representing both the Affiliate Network and the broader community.

Participants collectively drafted a statement that acknowledges the need for improvements in copyright law worldwide. The board formally endorsed the statement in October. The statement won’t be surprising or controversial to people who’ve been following CC for very long. What it will do is clarify that as an organization, we don’t see open licensing as the only solution to every problem with copyright law.

For a longer explanation of the context around this issue and what it means for the organization, see the blog post about it.

CEO Transition: The Search Begins

The last part of our meeting in Buenos Aires focused on Cathy’s plans to transition from her role as CEO in early 2014, after three years of service. Cathy has been a tremendous strategic leader for the organization, and with the focus she has brought to CC’s mission and priorities, we are substantially closer to achieving our vision than ever before.

To ensure a wide and thorough search for our next CEO, the Board of Directors has engaged m/Oppenheim to lead our search process. The search committee has now been formed; we expect to launch the search publicly in the near future, and look forward to community input. Please send any ideas about candidates to Lisa Grossman, lisag@moppenheim.com.

As the Creative Commons leadership changes, its mission remains constant, and I am continually heartened by the memory of the summit which confirmed that the global community’s commitment to our movement — to a more open internet and world — are stronger than ever.

Creative Commons is looking to hire a part-time contractor to assist the CC Global Network team with organizational planning, strategic communications, community building, and fundraising in the Arab World. The focus of the position in 2014 will include supporting local affiliates, conducting outreach to new communities, and coordinating collaborative projects. Candidates should be based in the Middle East region, and the position will require international travel. Candidates should be able to communicate in Arabic and English.

This is a great opportunity for a knowledgeable and motivated free culture advocate or community organizer. Please follow the instructions on the CC website if you’d like to apply.

The structure of human proteins defines, in part, what it is to be human. It is very expensive, as much as a couple of million USD, to determine the structure of human membrane proteins. Improvements in methods, computers and access to the complete sequence of our DNA, however, has made it possible to adopt more systematic approaches, and thus reduce the time and cost to determine the shapes of proteins. Structural genomics helps determine the 3D structures of proteins at a rapid rate and in a cost-effective manner. Structural information provides one of the most powerful means to discover how proteins work and to define ligands that modulate their function. Such ligands are starting points for drug discovery.

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, solves the structures of human proteins of medical relevance and places all its findings, reagents and know-how into the public domain without restriction. Using these structures and the reagents generated as part of the structure determination process as well as the chemical probes identified, the SGC works with organizations across the world to further the understanding of the biological roles of these proteins. The SGC is particularly interested in human protein kinases, metabolism-associated proteins, integral membrane proteins, and proteins associated with epigenetics and rare diseases.

Drug discovery tends to be a crapshoot. As we are not good at target validation that essentially occurs in patients, more than 90% of the pioneer targets fail in Phase 2. Nevertheless, many academics and pharmas work on the same, small group of targets in competition with each other, wasting resources and careers, needlessly exposing patients to molecules destined for failure. The SGC chooses not to work under the lamp post, focusing on those targets for which there is little or no literature. This is because it is such pioneer targets, which will deliver pioneer, breakthrough medicines.

The SGC is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership, funded by public and charitable funders in Canada and UK, and eight large pharmaceutical companies – GSK, Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim, Janssen, Takeda and Abbvie, whose mandate is to promote the development of new medicines by determining 3D structures on a large scale and cost-effectively, targeting human proteins of biomedical importance and proteins from human parasites that represent potential drug targets.

The SGC is now responsible for between a quarter and half of all structures deposited into the Protein Data Bank (PDB) each year. The SGC has released the structures of nearly 1500 proteins with implications to the development of new therapies for cancer, diabetes, obesity, and psychiatric disorders. As evident from the chart, SGC has published as many protein kinases as the rest of academia combined.

The SGC’s structural biology insights have allowed us to make significant progress toward the understanding of signal transduction, epigenetics and chromatin biology, and metabolic disease. The SGC has adopted the following Open Access policy—the SGC and its scientists are committed to making their research outputs (materials and knowledge) available without restriction on use. This means that the SGC promptly places its results in the public domain and agrees to not file for patent protection on any of its research outputs. This not only provides the public with this fundamental knowledge, but also allows commercial efforts and other academics to utilize the data freely and without any delay. The SGC seeks the same commitment from any research collaborator. The structural information is made available to everyone either when the structure is released by the PDB, or pre-released on www.thesgc.org.

“Society desperately needs new treatments for many chronic (AD, bipolar disorder, pain…) or rare diseases. This need is growing because of aging societies and diseases of modern living. As a biomedical community, we have yet to deliver truly novel treatments for many such conditions. This is not for lack of effort or resources. It is simply that these disorders are complex and there are too many variables or unknowns. It is clear that no one group or organisation can do this on their own. What we are trying to do is to bring together the best scientists from across the world, irrespective of affiliation, pooling resources and infrastructures, reducing wasteful duplicative activity to catalyse the creation of new medicines for patients. Secrecy and competition in early phases of target identification/discovery are slowing down drug discovery, making the process more difficult and more expensive.”

We at CC applaud the SGC’s commitment to open access and look to them for leadership in this arena. We believe the SGC’s findings would be a great candidate for the CC0 Public Domain Dedication because of the CC0 mark’s global recognition and a common legal status.

The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article. Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users. Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research.

The creators have also indicated that they plan to release the data collected by the Open Access Button under CC0. Congratulations on the release of this useful tool.

Whenever I’m talking with high schoolers about Creative Commons, one thing always strikes me. They get it. Today’s young content creators don’t dream of spending 40 years working for a single publisher or media company. They’re preparing to piece careers together working on projects for lots of clients with lots of different business models; therefore, they intuitively know the value of using open licensing to get their work out to as wide an audience as possible. Or as Cathy put it, “The creators who are thriving today are the ones who use internet distribution most innovatively; in fact, the ones who are most generous with their work often reap the most reward.”

I’m hoping to use this session to meet some people at school journalism programs who’d like to experiment with ramping up their sharing. What if your school newspaper went 100% CC for a year? Where would the content get republished? How would it impact your staff’s résumés? Interested? Let’s talk.